To extend the frontier of genome editing and enable the radical redesign of mammalian genomes, we developed a set of dead-Cas9 base editor (dBE) variants that allow editing at tens of thousands of loci per cell by overcoming the cell death associated with DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) and single-strand breaks (SSBs). We used a set of gRNAs targeting repetitive elements – ranging in target copy number from about 31 to 124,000 per cell. dBEs enabled survival after large-scale base editing, allowing targeted mutations at up to ~13,200 and ~2610 loci in 293T and human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs), respectively, three orders of magnitude greater than previously recorded. These dBEs can overcome current on-target mutation and toxicity barriers that prevent cell survival after large-scale genome engineering. One Sentence Summary Base editing with reduced DNA nicking allows for the simultaneous editing of >10,000 loci in human cells.

Download data

• Downloaded 5,995 times
• Download rankings, all-time:
  • Site-wide: 1,326
  • In synthetic biology: 13
• Year to date:
  • Site-wide: 23,045
• Since beginning of last month:
  • Site-wide: 22,823

Altmetric data

Downloads over time

Distribution of downloads per paper, site-wide